Francesca Lake summoned a riveting show from the spirits of her Jamaican heritage, a collection she’d named Wake the Town. On the first morning of London Fashion Week, it certainly did. Here was one of those debuts that take people by surprise: crinolines, towering feathered tricornes, white lace, and widow’s weeds merged with snake-printed leathers, pearl corsetry and baroque-patterned denim walking in procession in front of a pair of oaken church doors.
“There’s a Jamaican toasting song that goes, ‘Wake the town and tell the people,’” Lake explained the night before the show. “ But it’s also a play on words of the idea of the (funeral) wake in Jamaica, which is like a celebration of life.” Beginning with sculptural chiffon in vaguely organic-vegetal shapes the momentum of her procession built into elaborately textured pieces, a man’s white jacket made of tablecloth lace and doily-crochet-work with a macramé crucifix on the back, curved jeans with lace-edged white handkerchiefs tucked in back pockets, and a veiled lady in black bustled dress.
Lake’s symbolism visibly extends into what she describes as “a neo-Caribbean perspective, elaborating on and celebrating the nuanced forms of dress in Jamaica.” You glimpsed what she meant when zeroing in on the image of the crinolined woman in white, her skirts plumped out with white pillows: she was delicately holding a white-painted bunch of bananas in the dainty attitude of a parasol. Lake said that duality was inspired by a 1919 postcard image of women market traders in Kingston. “I changed it to be kind of symbolic of the way that we would see aristocratic images of women with umbrellas in their hands or parasols,” she said. “So the collection has a lot of the characters within the working class system of Jamaica—placing those in juxtaposition to tropes of aristocracy.”
She listed off references to Marcus Garvey and to the 18th century militia in Jamaica. “I try to tackle serious subjects in somewhat of a very lighthearted way. So there’s always an element of satire and jovial kind of artifice.” Lake graduated from Central Saint Martin’s MA, arriving there from Kingston with a Bachelor’s degree in cultural studies from the University of the West Indies.
Her 2023 graduation collection Church and Dancehall was a revelation of the push-and-pull between sexuality and religion that coexists in Jamaican culture. Her main point is that what she brings to the UK scene tells of deeper and more academically-researched aspects of her nation’s histories. “The way Jamaica is represented in culture and art, a lot of the time I find it to be very repetitive and very one dimensional. You know, usually it is very much a rastafari on a beach and a coconut and resort.”
Becoming a designer who shows in London, she also sees it as responsibilty to her home country. “I think that it’s important that we kind of have opportunities to tell our story in a global space like London, because we don’t often get that.”
In the intervening seasons since graduating, Lake’s been building a base in selling her denim and carved leather tailoring, and the occasional custom order. Her runway debut gave a distinct sense that she’s been saving up all of this time for the moment when she can give herself full voice. Surrounding her runway, she’d mounted an exhibition of her poetry, over which people lingered for a long time, spellbound.
